next to the Klansman, and she knitted and knitted. Yes, I am a
Jew , I said. I repeated my questions. He memorized my face, then
stared straight ahead.
In my few remaining minutes on the floor, I implored the Mississippi women to talk to me. I went hurriedly from row to row, expecting somewhere to find one rebellious sign of interest or simple compassion. One woman dared to speak to me in whispers, but did not dare look at me; instead she looked down into her own lap,
and the woman next to her got jittery and upset and kept telling
her to “think again. ” She whispered that she was against the Equal
Rights Amendment because girls would have to go to war. I said:
we say we love our children but isn’t it true that if we send our
boys to war we can’t love them very much? why are we willing to
have them killed if we love them? At this point the marshals forced
me physically to leave the floor. They did not ask or tell or say,
“Tim e’s up”; they pushed. *
In the face of the Klan and the marshals, I risked one more trip
back to the Mississippi delegation. On the floor, delegates were
milling around; it was a brief recess (but the same strict time limits
applied for journalists). In the sheer confusion of the numbers and
the noise, the discipline of the Mississippi delegation had relaxed
slightly. A Mississippi woman explained to me that as a Christian
woman she was in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position. I asked her if she really meant to say that boys were less valuable; and was that why
we sacrificed them in wars— because we didn’t think they were
worth very much? She said that it was the nature of boys to guard
*The system o f press access to the convention floor that favored male
journalists over female was set up by a male “feminist. ” It was outrageously, unashamedly, and inexcusably sex-discriminatory.
and to protect, which included going to war and also taking care of
their families. She was not prepared to say that boys were less
valuable than girls, only that women were superior to men in
Christianity, had a favored place based on and because of the
male’s role as protector. God, she said, wanted her husband to
protect her. The Equal Rights Amendment would force her to take
responsibility for decision making and for money. She did not
want to take this responsibility because to do so would be against
the w ill of God. She then said that she was equal spiritually in
God’s eyes but in no other w ay. I said that seemed to mean that in
every other w ay she was inferior, not superior. She said that feminists want women and men to be the same but that God says they are different. The Equal Rights Amendment would permit homosexuality because men and women would no longer be as different as God wanted them to be. Being homosexual was a sin because
women tried to be the same as men, and homosexuality confused
the differences between men and women, those differences being
the will of God. The recess ended, and with the return of order
(delegates seated and under discipline again) no more talk between
the Mississippi woman and m yself was possible. The marshals approached; don’t you fucking touch me, I said loudly, ending forever the possibility of further conversation with the Mississippi delegation; and I ran out fast so that the marshals fucking wouldn’t
touch me.
The Utah delegation had women supporters who attended the
convention as observers, a non voting status. Most of the right-wing
women did not care to attend the conference unless they were delegates; instead they attended Phyllis Schlafly’s counterconvention in another part of town. I was interested in the Utah women because
they had wanted to show themselves in an arena where they were a
small and unpopular minority. T hey all wore similar black dresses,
mourning I supposed for the unborn, mourning perhaps for us all,
the feminists so ungodly who surrounded them. The Mississippi
delegation had been a unit unto itself, not interacting at all with the
world of people and ideas around them. M y own evaluation was
